Issue
I have an autotools project that references an external directory containing build output of a different project (headers, libs, etc...). configuring and building via command line works fine. After importing via eclipse as an existing autotools project, none of the headers/references in that second project are found by eclipse.
Eclipse also fails to find a few libraries/headers that are in non-standard system locations like /opt, etc... Thus, autocomplete, ctrl+click, etc... doesn't work on a lot of things.
Both the second project and the non-standard libraries are correctly referenced when building/compiling and are found properly by configure
I'm able to manually add the necessary paths in the C/C++ build settings to get all of the includes resolved, but I was under the impression that importing an autotools project should automatically find these references. Am I incorrect in that assumption?
An additional note, our configure script requires the use of --prefix to know where to find the second project. when importing the project the first time, it of course tries to autoconf everything without --prefix set and subsequently fails. I then go back in and modify eclipse to use the appropriate prefix OR manually re-run autogen and configure with --prefix=/some/path. Then re-index the project. so everything should be setup fine at this point.
Solution
The actual question seems to be this:
I'm able to manually add the necessary paths in the C/C++ build settings to get all of the includes resolved, but I was under the impression that importing an autotools project should automatically find these references. Am I incorrect in that assumption?
Your own experience tells you otherwise, notwithstanding your prior expectation.
In an Eclipse Autotools project, an Autotools build system is used to (configure and) build the project instead of any of Eclipse's built-in builders. To the extent that there is a data flow between components, it is from Eclipse to the project, not the other way around. The distributed Autotools artifacts (Makefile.am, configure.ac, etc.) are opaque to Eclipse, except inasmuch as it has content highlighting for those file types (IIRC). Artifacts built by configuring the project are not only opaque, but also ignored by policy.
Answered By - John Bollinger
